As humid days give way to a fall chill, many of us are pondering ways to heat our homes with something other than natural gas ¡ª which is expected to cost 11 percent more this year than the last heating season, according to recent forecasts by the U.S. Department of Energy.
A hot topic, and growing more intense, is geothermal heating systems.
ClimateMaster, a manufacturer of geothermal units, has seen business grow 20 percent to 25 percent every year for the past few years.
Mike Dempsey, owner of American Heating & Air Conditioning in Cincinnati, says many high-end homeowners have opted for geothermal systems in newly built homes over the past two or three years, and the trend is creeping into existing homes.
But there are many homeowners who have stuck with this technology since its humble beginnings, and now are embracing the next generation of geothermal systems that they, in part, helped refine.
Systems pay off
James B. Helmer Jr. remembers when he had to "flood the fields" ¡ª
his backyard ¡ª when his home's geothermal grids, buried just 5 feet deep, got too hot and singed the grass from the roots up.
"They tell you it's always 50 degrees if you go down 5 feet, but that's not always true," Helmer says, recalling a stretch of 90-degree days three or four years ago. "We were actually pumping 180-degree temperatures into the home."
Helmer and his wife, Deborah, installed a geothermal system in their new home in 1995.
After learning to flood the pits and cool the grids when necessary, the system worked well for 11 years.
The heating costs for the 20,000-square-foot home were only about double that of the couple's previous 3,500-square-foot home.
In January, the couple updated to a modern system with 20 closed loops of piping that circulate an antifreeze-like solution and plunge 300 feet ¡ª instead of 5 ¡ª to reach ground with a constant temperature.
"They've solved a lot of the problems," Nancy Craig of Springfield Township says of earlier geothermal system.
Craig and her husband, Richard, had a geothermal system for 15 years. It functioned perfectly until a few years ago, when the dirt began to pull away from the pipes, and the unit didn't take in enough energy to cool the home.
The couple decided to go geothermal again ¡ª this time with wells back-filled with grout to keep the pipes in contact with the soil.
Other options
Dreaming of heating your home with solar power? Energy from the earth? Organic waste?
Those in the energy industry say most homes have a long way to go before a renewable source of space heating will yield more savings than simple energy-efficient upgrades.
"I field questions all day from people who say, "I want solar panels,' and I have to say, "OK, this is how you're eventually going to go to solar power,' " says Chris Dwyer of Emotiv Energy in Cincinnati, who sells and installs solar and wind sys-tems.
Dwyer and others, including Randy Sizemore, owner of Entropy Inc., who specializes in all types of renewable energy, recommend homeowners start with an audit of their home's efficiency and focus on ways to improve it, like weatherizing doors and windows and upgrading the insulation or furnace.
"A lot of times they can just switch from a 75 to a 90 percent efficiency furnace. If they're paying $400 a month (to heat their home), a solar panel really isn't going to help," he says.
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